It took fourteen
agonizing innings to do it, but a team of combined prospects from the
Mexico
City Diablos Rojos and Oaxaca Guerreros topped the Campeche-Quintana
Roo squad,
4-3, last week in El Carmen (near Monterrey) to clinch their third
consecutive
Mexican League Academy Class AA League title and sixth straight crown
when the
winter Academy Rookie League seasons are factored in. The
Diablos-Guerreros had
a 55-30 record to top the Academy AA League standings, which included
eight
teams sharing prospects belonging to two LMB teams each.

Diablos-Guerros pitcher
Luis Rodriguez, whose rights belong to Mexico City, was named MVP after
going
6-2 with a 1.06 ERA (how did this guy lose TWO games, let alone one?)
while
striking out 108 batters and walking 22 over 76.1 innings. A Rodriguez
moundmate, Juan Carlos Lopez, led the circuit in wins with a perfect
9-0 mark
and strikeouts with 110 in 88 frames to go with his 1.62 ERA.Durango-Veracruz' Jesus Vega was the top
batter with an even .400 average, Juan Sanchez of Tigres-Campeche led
in homers
with 10 and Monterrey-Aguascalientes' Bryan Sosa's 69 RBIs were tops.
Remigio
Diaz was named Manager of the Year after leading the Monclova-Puebla
squad to a
47-40-1 record and a fourth-place finish.

According to Fernando Ballesteros
of Puro Beisbol, the Mexican League
has operated at least one academy since 1983 as a complex dedicated to
housing
hundreds of domestic prospects for the purpose of teaching and
developing
baseball skills, a number of which dot the map in Latin American
baseball-playing countries (including ten in Mexico alone).While the El Carmen complex is the
longest-running and most important of the LMB-linked five academies,
Ballesteros said in his May 15 Zona de
Contacto column that it is also perhaps the most "obsolete" (as
stated by one Liga official), adding that instructors there don't feel
motivation commensurate with their salaries.

The Tijuana Toros
operate an academy of their own from which the team has been able to
sell the
rights of several prospects to Major League organizations, there's
another in
the state of Sinaloa that reportedly has the "endorsement" of MLB but
lacks an established funding mechanism and faces an uncertain future
and
similar academies are operated by Gerardo Benavides in Monclova and
brothers
Juan Jose and Erick Arellano in their hometown of Mazatlan for their
Yucatan
and Laguna LMB prospects.

Brothers Adrian and
Edgar Gonzalez, along with father David, opened the Gonzalez Sports
Academy
near the California-Mexico border in 2010 and generated controversy by
seeking
to negotiate contracts with big league teams directly, bypassing the
Mexican
League (which recently was endorsed by MLB as exclusive rights-holders
for
Mexican prospects).That effort landed
in a courtroom in 2013 after the Majors ruled that one Gonzales
prospect's
rights actually belonged to the LMB Diablos Rojos and while
Ballesteros' May
column referred to that academy as still operational, the GSA website
was shut
down by a hacker and their Facebook page has had no activity since some
photos
were updated in early February.

TOROS
SWEEP MONTERREY TO STRETCH WIN STREAK TO 16 GAMES

Former AAA All-Star Game
outfielder (in 2010 for Rochester) Dustin Martin has had a hard time
getting
untracked in 2017, but he showed why he is still one of the most
dangerous
batters in a loaded Tijuana lineup by belting a pair of two-run homers
to aid
the Toros' 7-3 win over visiting Monterrey Thursday night at Estadio
Gasmart in
the border city.The triumph handed
Tijuana their fifth consecutive series sweep, this one against the
Mexican
League North Division leaders' closest challengers, while extending
their
season high win streak to 16 games.

The 33-year-old Martin,
a former Mets, Twins and Diamondbacks farmhand who was also a New
York-Penn
League All-Star in 2006 and Florida State League All-Star in 2007, hit
.325
with 19 homers, 33 stolen bases and 88 RBIs for Tijuana last year.Thus far in 2017, he's batting .254 with 14
homers, 23 steals and 67 ribbies in 96 games.Thursday night's performance showed that any opposing pitcher
who
downplays the Sam Houston State product to concentrate on the likes of
Corey
Brown, Alex Liddi or Cyle Hankerd in the playoffs may pay for their
oversight.

Despite Martin's
longball heroics, the key blow may have been a bases-clearing double by
Roberto
Lopez (batting ninth) in the second inning that gave the Toros a 3-0
lead that
Martin extended in the sixth with his first two-run blast.Monterrey narrowed the TJ lead to 5-3 when
ageless Rafael Diaz came in from the bullpen in the eighth and allowed
three
Sultanes runs on four hits before Juan Sandoval was sent to the mound
to record
the final out of the entrada, but Martin's second bomb in the bottom of
the
eighth provided the final margin of victory for the home team.

A packed house of 17,980
looked on at Estadio Gasmart (capacity 16,811) Thursday night, bringing
total
attendance for the three-game set to 49,416.More important, the potent Toros battered Monterrey's pitching
staff,
which came into the series with a team ERA of 3.87, for 24 runs on 35
hits over
the three games.Heading into Friday's
series opener at Aguascalientes, the 70-28 Toros now lead 63-34
Monterrey by
six-and-a-half games in the LMB North standings with 12 games left in
the
regular season.